Game ends, party doesn’t when Warriors play

1of11The Warriors Junior Jam Squad takes to the court to perform during a timeout as the Golden State Warriors take on the Cleveland Cavaliers in Game 1 of the NBA Finals at Oracle Arena.Photo: Michael Macor / Michael Macor / The Chronicle

2of11The Warriors drumline plays during a break in the action of Game 1 of the NBA Finals at Oracle Arena.Photo: Michael Macor / Michael Macor / The Chronicle

3of11Alicia Smith, senior manager of game operations, works from the tunnel just feet away from courtside during Game 1 of the NBA Finals at Oracle Arena.Photo: Michael Macor / Michael Macor / The Chronicle

4of11Kenny Lauer (left), Warriors vice president of digital and marketing, and Brett Yamaguchi, director of game operations, talks strategy as they prepare for the NBA Finals.Photo: Michael Macor / Michael Macor / The Chronicle

5of11Golden State Warriors' fan Oliver Wald of San Francisco cheers during Warriors' 106-99 win over New Orleans Pelicans in Game 1 of the 1st Round of NBA Western Conference Playoffs at Oracle Arena in Oakland, Calif., on Saturday, April 18, 2015.Photo: Scott Strazzante, The Chronicle

6of11Golden State Warriors' fans celebrate with Andrew Bogut after Warriors' 101-86 win over Memphis Grizzlies during Game 1 of NBA Playoffs' Western Conference Semifinals in Oakland, Calif., on Sunday, May 3, 2015.Photo: Scott Strazzante, The Chronicle

7of11Tricia Seith of Redwood City cheers on the team as the Golden State Warriors take on the Cleveland Cavaliers in Game one of the NBA finals at Oracle Arena, in Oakland, Calif., on Thurs. June 4, 2015.Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle

8of11Fans celebrate the victory as the Golden State Warriors beat the Los Angeles Clippers 100-99. on Thursday May 1, 2014, in Oakland, Calif., in game 6 of the NBA Western Conference playoffs.Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle

9of11Golden State Warriors' fan Scott Holloway waits for Game 1 of NBA Playoffs' Western Conference Semifinals to start in Oakland, Calif., on Sunday, May 3, 2015.Photo: Scott Strazzante, The Chronicle

10of11Fans begin to arrive for Golden State Warriors and Memphis Grizzlies' Game 5 of NBA Playoffs' Western Conference Semifinals at Oracle Arena in Oakland, Calif., on Wednesday, May 13, 2015.Photo: Scott Strazzante, The Chronicle

11of11Kenny Lauer, (left) Vice President of Digital and Marketing, with the Golden State Warriors, displays the four pins that are available for each playoff round which is now complete to form the NBA trophy, with the Finals pin now in place at the top, as seen at the downtown offices of the Golden State Warriors in Oakland, Calif., on Tues. June 2, 2015.Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle

A regulation NBA game takes 48 minutes to play, but the live show behind it takes four hours, five or six if you count the 45-minute pregame audience warm-up and disc jockey jam, the postgame fireworks shot off the roof of Oracle Arena and the dance party outside on the plaza.

The Golden State Warriors are known for having the loudest and loyalest fans in the NBA, but they don’t all walk in the door that way. They have to be whipped into a frenzy, and that order comes down from co-owner Peter Guber, who once told The Chronicle that he was in the “emotional transportation business.”

Constant stimulation is required for that ride, and the person who supplies it is Brett Yamaguchi, a kid from Fremont who started out as an intern with the Warriors 19 seasons ago. Now he is director of game operations and sits center court at the scorer’s table, wearing a headset with two channels to control every aspect of in-game entertainment that does not involve the in-game entertainment of Steph or Klay or Dray raining down the threes.

“The game is the main event, but we are the show within the show,” says Yamaguchi, 41, who has opened the biggest show of his career, the NBA Finals, for the first time ever in Oakland. “We are trying to send each fan away to tell a story of what they just saw.”

The story starts when the first fan takes a seat and puts on the giveaway gold T-shirt that has been put over every seat back. From that moment on, the din builds in the arena as Yamaguchi conducts a performance that includes two DJs, one inside and one outside, two emcees, a public address announcer and two stage managers holding back and sending forth enough drummers, dancers, flag-wavers and high-flying trampoline dunk ball specialists to fill two quarter breaks, at least 10 timeouts and 14 minutes of halftime.

No mascot

With hosts Franco Finn and Ruby Lopez roaming the stands and DJ D-Sharp working a deck, the onslaught never stops or even slows long enough for anyone to notice that the Warriors do not have a mascot, having let Thunder go several seasons back.

“We stay away from dead air,” Yamaguchi says. “The only time it is quiet is when our players are shooting free throws.”

All of this crowd frothing has been going on in sports arenas since the first hyper PA announcer opened his show with the salutation “Are you ready to rrruuummmbbbuuulll?”

But the volume across the industry was turned up when the Warriors were purchased in 2010 by Silicon Valley investor Joe Lacob and Guber, a Hollywood showman who made his entry into sports as owner of several teams in minor league baseball, where the sideshow never stops.

Guber produced the films “Batman” and “Flashdance,” and some combination of those is what he expects to be provided game after game at Oracle.

“Peter is an experience builder,” says Kenny Lauer, 47, who Guber hired two years ago as vice president of digital and marketing. If Guber is in the “emotional transportation business,” Lauer is more pragmatic. He’s in the “experience creation business.”

“I don’t just benchmark against other NBA teams,” he says. “I benchmark against whoever is doing the finest work out there in experience in a closed space. Maybe it’s Cirque du Soleil in Vegas. Maybe it’s Nike, maybe it’s Adidas or Ideo.”

Lauer, a relative newcomer to the Warriors, has not seen what the veteran Yamaguchi has. “Brett has been through seasons where we were celebrating winning two games in a row,” Lauer says.

Now they have been through a season where the Warriors have won 47 games and lost only three at home. Each of those 47 home wins was a party, and with each round in the playoffs, the party gets bigger and better.

Lauer keeps a tray of sand on a table near his desk, and when the stress builds, he swings his chair to the table and reaches into the sand. Soon enough, Yamaguchi comes in, with a game script that is single-spaced and runs to four pages.

“Nothing is left to chance,” he says, though chance always rules in the ebb and flow of a basketball game.

Crowd reaction

During Thursday night’s Game 1, the Warriors Dance Team was sent to the floor at a time when the Warriors were trailing 19-13 after missing 14 of their first 16 shots. The crowd reaction was underwhelming. But when they were sent back out at the end of the third quarter, with the score tied at 73, it was as though Madonna and Lady Gaga had joined the team.

“When the crowd is up and hyped, we want to keep it hyped,” says stage manager Alicia Smith, who is 6 feet 6 and keeps the entertainers at bay in the north tunnel, waiting to take the court.

If the wrong act is sent out, it can be a buzz kill or, as Lauer put it in reference to an ill-received entertainment selection during last year’s playoffs, “I don’t think we are going to have another contortionist.”

Yamaguchi’s worst nightmare had to have been the national anthem singer who forgot the words, a forgivable sin until she started chastising the crowd for getting on her about it.

“That was almost an early retirement,” says Yamaguchi, who hasn’t gotten over it even 12 years later.

Under Guber, the staff of “emotional transportation” engineers has grown from 20 to 25, and during games there can be as many as 115 people involved.

T-shirt giveaways

The entertainment budget has been increased. Lauer will not say by how much, but the blank T-shirts alone cost at least $2 each and then they must be printed and placed on each of the 19,596 seats. An additional 2,500 shirts go to fans in standing room areas or are fired into the stands from bazookas on the court and dropped from parachutes, bringing the total giveaway to 22,000 T-shirts per game.

The Warriors have been giving away T-shirts since their playoff runs in the 1990s, and have been credited as the first NBA team to do so.

“I’ve been doing shirts forever,” says team marketing director Caleb Homeres, who arrived in 2000 and approaches his task with the somber resolve of a munitions supplier in a combat zone.

At the season opener and four other regular-season games, the T-shirts were white. But that is not really a Warriors color, so for the playoff run, they switched to gold — 264,000 of them, all size XL.

“We ordered almost all the gold shirts in the U.S. with the assumption that we would go all the way in the playoffs,” Lauer says.

Postgame party

The other thing the Warriors give away is the postgame party outside the building, which is necessitated by circumstance after every victory.

“We end up with people not wanting to leave the arena,” Yamaguchi says.

To get them out the door Thursday night, he had DJ Umami cranking it up on the second-level walkway between the arena and the stadium.

Within minutes, hundreds of gold T-shirts were dancing and swaying. The crowd came to a crescendo, whooping, hollering and waving oversized cutouts of player’s faces, as blue and gold fireworks exploded overhead.

“The Bay ain’t never seen anything like this,” one reveler said. “This s— is off the chain!”

Sam Whiting has been a feature writer at The San Francisco Chronicle for 30 years. He started in the People section, which was anchored by Herb Caen's column, and has written about people ever since. For five years he had a weekly Sunday magazine column called Neighborhoods. He currently covers art, culture and entertainment for the Datebook section. He walks a minimum of three miles a day in San Francisco, searching out public art and street art for posting on Instagram @sfchronicle_art.